Paul Rubens

Millions of dollars must be lost every month by organizations throughout the world as employees mess about on Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites instead of getting on with their work. It’s no surprise then that an estimated 25 percent of U.S. businesses block employee access to these sites, according to a survey consulting […]

UNIX is a ship very slowly letting in water. The rats aren’t about to abandon it quite yet, but they are certainly checking where the life vests are stored. The cause of the leak is Linux. UNIX may account for about a third of the server market, but its upstart cousin is slowly but surely […]

It’s going to be standing room only in the cloud pretty soon — everybody who’s anybody in the tech world seems to be heading up there. Hot on the heels of VMware’s announcement of its Virtual Datacenter OS, which is intended to make it easy for companies to transfer their applications to resources in the […]

When economic times get tough, organizations look at ways to cut costs. That’s bad news for Sun, because its wares don’t come cheap: A number of CTOs I’ve been talking to recently have already jettisoned Sun Solaris systems because of their high costs. Here’s what one had to say: “We had two Sun boxes running […]

Linux has made steady progress infiltrating the data center as a server operating system, but so far it has been far less successful as an enterprise desktop operating system. At first glance that seems strange: Linux has the reputation for being faster, thinner, more stable and cheaper than Windows, so why wouldn’t every organization want […]

It certainly looks like people are still taking heed of the old adage that “No one ever got fired for buying IBM”: One third of all server spending went to Big Blue in the last quarter, according to IDC’s latest Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker figures, giving it the largest share of the Unix market. Maybe […]

What’s the story with Microsoft, Novell and a small matter of a cool $100 million? It seems the boys at Redmond agreed to spend up to that amount buying coupons from Novell that can be exchanged for maintenance and support for SLES Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) from Novell. This follows a similar deal in November […]

A couple of weeks back in OS Roundup I wrote a piece about Applewhich generated a fair level of response, so I thought it would be sensible to take another look at it. As well as pointing out that I share a name (albeit spelled differently) with the TV and film character Pee-wee Herman, many […]

Of all the announcements to come out of last week’s LinuxWorld expo in San Francisco, the two most interesting takeaways are Ubuntu’s imminent assault on the enterprise space and the fact that the rise of community Linux distros in large organizations is at hand. A well-timed series of announcements from Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu), […]

Many corporate data centers are running out of space and power, and far from improving matters, virtualization technology may actually be about to make things much worse. That’s because any space and energy savings that may be achieved through server virtualization and consolidation could be outweighed by the vast numbers of new servers that will […]